March 26, 2009 - Hazardous Software™ unveiled Achron™, the world’s first meta-time strategy game, at the 2009 Game Developers Conference® in San Francisco, California. The next revolution in time travel gameplay was demonstrated at the Experimental Gameplay Session.
Designed to reinvent the real-time strategy genre by allowing all players to travel through time, Achron is a futuristic science fiction game. Players and units have the ability to jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently. Time travel is free and unlimited but it costs energy to change the time line. Players will be challenged to invent new strategies in a world where it is possible for them and their opponents to undo mistakes, change a strategy after committing to it, and alter the outcome of past battles.
“Time travel transforms the strategy game landscape,” stated Christopher Hazard, president and cofounder of Hazardous Software. “It opens up new dimensions of strategies and gameplay. For example, imagine being able to see when and where your opponents are going to attack before they do.”
Achron features both a captivating single player campaign and an online multiplayer mode. In addition to being able to build, expand, and attack as in typical RTS games, new mechanisms such as command hierarchy and smart-idling ease the management of a complex time travel environment. An intuitive user interface depicts events in the past and future allowing the player to navigate the time line.
“Achron signifies the creation of a brand new sub-genre of video games that utilize gimmick-free time travel as one of the core gameplay mechanisms,” said Mike Resnick, lead developer and cofounder of Hazardous Software. “The popular type of time travel abundant in science fiction is now available to the gaming community.”
Further information about the game will be released in the upcoming months. To learn more about Achron, please visit the official web site at www.achrongame.com.
About Hazardous Software
Hazardous Software was incorporated in June 2007 and is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina near Research Triangle Park. The company was founded to address the gamer’s desire for more innovative games in the marketplace. Hazardous Software believes games should challenge players’ minds while being entertaining and engaging.
Podem ler o resto do FAQ aqui e consultar o website do jogo para mais informação.Q. What is it?
A. Achron is a real-time strategy (RTS) war game designed around the ability to time travel anywhere along a timeline. Jump back in time to save that production facility, or add a flanking maneuver to a raid! It's entirely up to you.
Q. What about playing in the future of the timeline?
A. Playing in the future has several purposes such as scouting, finding out about a large battle that has not yet happened, or building units with resources you don't yet have in the present.
Q. Dude, paradoxes?! You know, grandfather paradox, units fighting side by side?
A. Paradoxes can exist, but since the window of time is limited (e.g., an 8 minute window) all events eventually fall off. A paradox will oscillate between its different states until one of the states reaches the edge of the time window, leaving the players locked into one of the two states. Example: in the case of the grandfather paradox (where you use a factory to build a tank, have the tank time travel to before it was built, and then use it to destroy the factory) you will play with the paradox until it 'falls off' the time window, at which point there is a 50/50 chance of either the tank lives and the factory is destroyed, or the factory remains and the tank was never created. All paradoxes are nicely resolved with time.
Q. It's a trick, right? You're going to throw a flashy visual effect on the screen and then make me wait for another level to load, aren't you?
A. Nope. Fiddle with the past, present, and future to your heart's content. The engine smooths the changes you make down the timeline, leaving you free to twist your enemy's strategy to your advantage.
Q. Is it true that I can keep sending units back in time to have them fight along side themselves and duplicate an entire army?
A. Yes you can, but not without consequences. It costs chronoenergy to command units from the past to travel further into the past, and obviously you use more chronoenergy to control more units in the past. Also you are using up your playing time to manage this instead of building units or controlling your armies. And finally, if the original 'parent' units are damaged, the time traveled version will wind up being damaged and if the original units are destroyed and don't travel back in time, you wind up undoing the entire cycle.
Q. My head is exploding already. Are you sure this is easy?
A. Yes, though grandfather paradoxes are the most complicated aspect of the game, they don't tend to happen much in actual gameplay. The rest is super quick to learn. It's like learning to use a DVR control to rewatch a tv show or using your DVD control to jump around chapters in a movie - once you start using time travel it's really simple, but if you've never picked up a remote controller before, those play and 'next-chapter' buttons look scary. We've been play-testing for 4 years and have learned how to make this game accessible, taking people who never played an RTS before and have them effectively using time travel 5 minutes into the game. We do this by unveiling time travel gradually to the player, so you are not fully thrust into it right away, but can learn to play it one step at a time.
Q. How does one player beat another?
A. While we have a variety of end-game conditions for the single player campaigns, we have two primary modes for multiplayer games. The first mode is: your game is over if you lose your ability to attack or produce units at any point in time. This yields interesting strategies where one player can be losing in the past, but rush in the present and still win. The second mode is: your game is over if you lose your ability to attack or produce units at the oldest position on the timeline, as it is impossible to recover from this. However, this second mode can obviously add time to the end-game.
Q. How stable/buggy is this game? I can't imagine a game engine this complex without bugs!
A. Very stable. We have taken QA extremely seriously because of how complex time travel is, and we have been testing multiplayer games for 4 years.
Vejam os seguintes vídeos para tirarem algumas dúvidas:
Achron Alpha Demo 1 - Time Travel Explained
Achron Alpha Demo 2 - Multiplayer Time Travel
Achron Alpha Demo 3 - Chronoporting
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